Japanese uses three separate writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The first two are phonetic systems and so show the pronunciation of Japanese words, and kanji is the Japanese variation of Chinese characters and show the meaning of Japanese words. The three systems are used interchangeably, and all three systems can often be found in the same sentence. The three systems are each reserved for different purposes.

In English, the order of the words is very important. For example, the sentences "Is it?" and "It is." mean different things. In Japanese, differences are made often by adding or changing the ending of words. A Japanese word has a stem called a "body", and additional parts (called suffixes). Changing the suffix can change the meaning or the grammar of the word.

Japanese has five vowel sounds that can have two different lengths. They are a, i, u, e, o. In IPA they are transliterated as /a/, /i/, /ɯ/, /e/, /o/; and they are pronounced in English as ah, ee, oo, eh, oh. Lengthening a vowel can change the meaning of the word: ojisan (おじさん, uncle) and ojiisan (おじいさん, grandfather). Japanese has a sound that is like the Englishl, but it is also like the English r. (That is why it can be difficult for many Japanese when to learn to make both sounds when they speak English.) Japanese has a sound that is not uncommon in English and is usually written Tsu (つ). This sound appears in "tsunami" (つなみ), the Japanese word for large ocean waves caused by earthquakes or extreme weather.

When foreigners speak Japanese, it is important they know how formal they must be when they speak to people you may or may not know. In Japan, it could be considered quite impolite if you are not formal enough.

In Japanese, sentencesuse subject-object-verb (SOV) word order and so the verb is at the end of the sentence, and the subject is at the beginning. Many sentenceshave no subject, and the listener can guess the subject by thinking about the context and the form of the verb.

In Japanese, Japan is called Nihon (日本), and the language is called Nihongo (日本語) (-go means language). Sometimes, the words Nippon and Nippongo are also used, but both words are now thought of as more nationalist, and Nihon is a more neutral word. The kanji of the word mean "sun-origin." Since Japan is at the eastern edge of Asia, to observers in China, the sun rose from the direction of Japan. That is why Japan is called "The Land of Rising Sun."

Japanese is an agglutinative language, especially in its verbs. Its words has a short "body," and prefixes or suffixes are easily added to change or to redefine the meaning.

Japanese words come from three main sources. The first is wago (和語), which are native Japanese words and can also be called yamato kotoba (大和言葉). The second is kango (漢語), which are Chinese loanwords. The third is gairaigo (外来語), which are loanwords borrowed from languages other than Chinese (usually English since the Second World War).